Policy Brief: Nongovernment Organizations’ Complicity in Human Trafficking and the Southern Border Invasion, by Wade Miller

By Wade Miller, Center for Renewing America, March 17, 2025

As this report shows, many NGOs facilitating migration across the southern border, contributing to the abuse of our asylum system, and even incentivizing human trafficking and smuggling by the cartels receive a majority of their funding from the government, with some obtaining well over 90 percent of their annual revenue from U.S. taxpayers.

Introduction

There is a common misconception that the U.S. southern border with Mexico is chaotic and unregulated. For years, U.S. policymakers have allowed our border to become so porous that the Border Patrol reported well over two million encounters with illegal border crossers every year of the Biden administration after the COVID-19 pandemic.¹ Our nation has been inundated by waves of illegal aliens. But it would be a mistake to believe this means the U.S. border is unregulated.

Indeed, before President Donald Trump began imposing much-needed controls, the southern border was meticulously managed and hyper-regulated by international drug cartels. The Biden administration claimed, against all evidence, that this was not the case. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas insisted to Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) that “yes, we do” have operational control over the southern border. Roy responded to Mayorkas with a dose of reality and the terms of the law: “In this section, the term ‘operational control’ means the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”²

No reasonable observer believed the U.S. government had operational control over our borders. But that does not mean they were uncontrolled. …